Mass Effect: 1865
by 1054SS325MP
Summary: This is an AU Mass Effect story, featuring all the same characters you know and love, in a Galaxy Spanning Alien Abduction Adventure. It's about 300 years earlier though. I haven't decided if FemShep will be in it yet.
1. Right In Two

**This is a new Mass Effect story. I'm STILL continuing the WE, but I'd be lying if I said inspiration was hard for me to find at the moment. Transitioning from an Army at war to a garrison Army has not been kind to me. It's weird, but I'm actually hoping to get deployed to Liberia at this point... Anyway, here's the story:**

**This is an AU that takes place in the year 1865 AD, or 1865 CE for you hippies. In other words, it's 30 years before the Morning War. Think of it as a what-if or AU. All the characters from the universe we know and love are (theoretically) in it, only 318 years before the game starts. You'll see. Also, I have (very sadly) omitted femshep at this time. I might bring her in, if there's a popular demand to do so. I think I have a few more chapters in me (inspiration being what it is) before I have to make the decision to continue this or not.**

**Some notes:**

**I'm not the greatest at writing according to the period. Some historical anachronisms will happen. You may either ignore them or substitute something better. 150 year old dialogue is also not my specialty. Again, ignore or substitute. Finally, I don't like the whole dextro/levo thing. So for this, everyone is levo. Quarians still have crappy immune systems though, but it isn't nearly as bad yet, because they haven't been exiled yet.**

**...**

**Chapter 1: Right In Two**

**...**

"What the hell's going on down there?"

"Dunno. Looks like some kind of battle," Tarrak mused, staring at the screen to the left of his command seat, "It's happening all over the center of the northern land-mass, concentrated near the eastern coast."

"It won't be a problem will it?" asked Ju'lee, his second.

He could forgive her naivete on the subject. A green recruit just finished her compulsory service in the Kar'shan defense forces, she had never conducted a raid on a slaver ship before. The girl had only ever been trained to deal with mass effect weapons, and to her, everything with a barrel and a trigger was the same. He couldn't afford to be picky, however. Not with an operation as small as his.

"No, no. A well placed knife, maybe, but the primitive guns won't do anything against your armor, let alone your shields. Now, if you're planning on running around naked out there, those dense metal rounds will rip clean through you," he added with a chuckle.

"Huh," she appeared to mull over the idea. "And they fight like that? Wearing nothing but colored organic textiles? Is their skin that tough? Like a turian's? I didn't think they could handle being shot any better than we could."

"They can't. They just don't seem to care."

The thought of one of these primitives putting up any kind of resistance was laughable, but still, it happened. Some races just didn't know when they were beat. Like one of their 'guests' whom they had foolishly given the task of servicing the _Halcyon Harvester_'s long suffering engines in exchange for better rations. Never again. He hoped the her penance was sufficient to demonstrate the error of her ways.

Tarrak couldn't imagine the evolutionary pressures needed to produce a race that continued to fight like that, in whatever petulant ways its circumstances allowed it to muster, even when its continued existence stood at stake.

A turian would simply accept the new order, the new chain of command, and adapt to it. They made great slaves, except that the Patriarchy tended to frown on the practice in the most destructive ways imaginable. Hanar and Elcor were similarly subservient, though generally useless unless one had fishing nets to set or a field to plow.

Asari made better use of the circumstances than any race known, so much so that their collection had to be curtailed some years ago. More than once an Asari maiden had been taken, bore all the children of both her master and mistress, raised the offspring, and eventually turned an entire batarian noble-house into Asari. As far as conquering techniques went, Tarrak had to admit, it was by far both the most gentle and insidious.

Salarians were great if one needed a maid or a house-keeper or a doctor, but manual labor escaped them. They complained enormously with every little task assigned to them, but rarely attempted to flee. Like a volus, they could be counted on to eventually buy their way to freedom. Of course a volus's family would more than likely offer to pay top dollar to buy their kin back and be done with the whole affair by the evening meal. They were a good way to make a quick credit.

Even other Batarians made fine slaves. To them, it was just another hazard of existence.

And then there were the quarians. Though they were some of, if not _the_, best techs in the galaxy, and at least as good at manual labor as a batarian, they made for _terrible _slaves.

Not only did their non-spacers require the use of either a re-breather or constant medication until they could adapt to any new environment, but they always tried to escape. Or, as was the case with this especially peevish specimen, they simply tried to kill everyone in the vicinity, themselves included. They worked best as indentured servants rather than slaves, where their generally infallible honestly obligated them to try and work off their debt rather than flee, but Tarrak wasn't a con-man, he was a slaver.

If these primitives they discovered turned out to be anything like that, Tarrak vowed to cut his losses and space all the mammals aboard.

"How many do you want to get?" asked Ju'lee.

"If the council finds out we've discovered a garden would inhabited by a new race, a _primitive_ race, and started taking the natives, we'll have a Spectre on us in a heartbeat," he said. "Best to take one at first, find some interested buyers who won't put them on display immediately, see how it works out, then come back for more, one, two, or three at a time, max."

"How are we going to pick one?" she asked, "Maybe we should go to one of the lesser inhabited areas."

"I thought about it," he replied, "And in all the foliage on this world, our visible-band cameras won't pick anything up, and the IR can't distinguish the primitives from the rest of the animals. We have about a hundred or so here to choose from anyway."

"But they're all fighting," she said, "An I don't care what you say, I don't want them pointing one of those guns at me. They might stop fighting each other and attack us, or worse, go off and warn their superiors about us. That would make it harder to take them in the future."

"They _are_ fighting," he said, "That's exactly right. We'll just wait until the battle is over and collect one of the survivors from the losing force. It shouldn't be long now. The ones in blue aren't doing so hot. I'm tracking one now."

...

Captain John Alan Shepard, commander of Charlie Company, Third Battalion, First Maryland Volunteer Infantry Regiment, felt like shit.

Not only had he and his men been routed by an entire battalion of confederates, but his horse had been shot out from under him and he was pretty sure his ankle had broken. It had twisted painfully in the fall when his foot caught in the stirrup.

He had gone back to gather more of the wounded after sounding the retreat, looking for anyone that couldn't move under their own power. He had passed stragglers catching up to the main element in groups, those carrying others or shambling along toward the rally point, but he had left them to look for more, keeping a running tally as he had galloped. Those he passed would be fine, he knew. The confederates were too busy consolidating their Pyrrhic victory to give chase.

With only two unaccounted for, he had found one young man, a sergeant, with his head split wide open by a confederate round. The final member of his company fared little better, making it a whole twenty paces before succumbing to his chest wound. With a silent prayer, he had turned his horse towards the rally point just in time for the beast's head to block a sniper's round. It hadn't even made a noise before falling to the ground.

He had waited there, for what seemed like hours, for the enemy to claim his body. He didn't know then, as he still didn't know now, what he would have done if they found him. Pistol in hand, he could have taken a few of them with him or he could have surrendered. Either one would have bought his boys a few more precious seconds to run if he had been wrong, if they were being chased.

What he had not expected was to be shot at and left for dead.

A hazy dusk settling onto the forest, now he limped along, at least a good hour away from both the enemy position and his waiting men, somewhere in between their two positions.

"Don't move or we'll kill you."

Finally, the enemy he had been expecting were upon him. He gave the whole affair a grim shrug of indifference. Yes, he was about to experience the luxuries of a Confederate prison, but his men would have regrouped at Division headquarters by now, far from the clutches of any pursuers.

But he had to wonder about the tinny, metallic quality of the voice, as if the person were speaking through a tube or into a glass jar, and at the gravely grumbling noises that accompanied it.

Halting in the middle of a painful stride, he leaned against a nearby tree and turned to face his soon-to-be captor.

And nearly fell flat on his face.

Before him was not a man. He could tell that, even in the dim light of the early evening. This thing was a creature from beyond his darkest imagination. Never particularly religious, he tried to remember whatever Bible verses dealt with demonic encounters and drew a blank. Shock gave way to silent confusion when the thing's weapon, leveled at John's midsection, registered in his conscious mind as the reason why his body had halted, refusing to move any closer to it.

Of what use did a demon have for a pistol?

"Good. You can understand me. Raise your hands above your head and walk slowly to me."

John heard it again, the tinny quality to its voice, but noticed something else this time. The movement of it's lips wasn't quite right. They didn't match the sounds John recognized as English, but they _did_ match the guttural noises sounding at the same time. The damn things had two voices, one he could understand, and one he couldn't.

"It looks hurt to me," said another voice, definitely a woman, a demonette, also sounding metallic. It addressed him directly, "Sir, are you hurt?"

"No, I'm fine," he replied.

He knew full well the obviousness of this lie, but he had to do it. If they asked, there was probably a reason they wanted to know. It could be that they were going to shoot him if he couldn't keep up when they started marching to wherever they were taking him. He walked over to them as best he could, slowly but evenly, and hiding his wince. He did not feel prepared for what he saw.

"What in the name God..."

Confederate Soldiers may have been ugly, but not like this. The creatures had teeth like a fish, skin like a wild hog, and to top it all off, four eyes. In his shock, he put too much pressure on his bad foot and collapsed to the soft ground. It took a moment for him to struggle back to his feet.

"He _is_ hurt," said the female, "Maybe we should find another?"

"No!" said John. The fear of losing more men struck him harder than any blow. "You won't take anyone else. You'll take me. I'll go. I'll heal. I won't even put up a fight."

He began hobbling back to the duo, holding his hands up in surrender.

"Fine. I like your attitude," said the male, "We'll repair you well enough to work."

The man-beast ushered him forward towards a doorway in the side of a well concealed building. A kind of netting had been strung over the tops and sides of the structure, and woven into it sat all manner of trapped vegetation, from pine needles, to thistle, to oak, to grass, even maple, sassafras, and mountain laurel. At a distance in would be impossible to distinguish the large house from any of the rest of the forest. That was his first clue that, if possible, something was more amiss than he first thought.

The second, third, and so on, came when he got a good look at the building's sides, base, and door. Not only were they metal, but they were pitted as well, as if the victim of some harsh and sandy beating at the hands of a desert wind-storm, an impossible occurrence in the temperate Appalachians. The base of the building stood a foot off the ground. It could have been suspended on some hidden legs, he reasoned, but more likely, there was a set carriage wheels underneath. It would go a long way to explaining how a house found its into the Appalachians from the Atacama. Of course, given that a pair of demons were at the helm, it could have rolled here from Hell itself for all he knew.

And the door looked suspiciously familiar, a frightfully odd thing for John Shepard to be thinking. Given that he had never met a demon-couple in person before, to the best of his knowledge, and had certainly never been invited into their locomotive abode, he ought to have had no frame of reference.

_Locomotive _was an apt descriptor as well as proper name for the metal behemoth, and John suddenly realized why the door looked so familiar. It could have been a dead ringer for a hatch found on any massive railway locomotive.

Like the pistols, the idea of demons needing a train engine, albeit one that ran without tracks, to ferry their victims to the pits of Hell seemed a bit off. He rather expected them to have simply opened a glowing gateway to fire and emptiness beneath his feet and dragged him under in their burning clutches, live wolves to a lamb. To be ushered into the back of a rail-car at the muzzle of a hand-gun was, well, anti-climactic.

He halted as his foot came to rest on the ingress. The loud clang of metal sounded as the heel of his cavalry boot hit metal. "So where are we going?" he asked.

"Perceptive, for a primitive," said the male creature, "We're going up there."

John followed its index finger out of habit, glancing up to the sky. So it was a locomotive, and a flying one at that. Why not? He frowned in confusion. The thing surely couldn't have meant the sky is their _destination, _could it? It meant that they were to be traveling _by way of the sky_, like an observer balloon if anything, didn't it?

He pulled himself up, still not allowing himself to cross completely through the doorway.

"So tell me," he said, looking from one creature to the other, "Do you mean that we'll be traveling _through_ the sky, or do you mean-"

A thundering crack rang out, deafening John for an instant before being replaced with the high-pitched whine of short-lived tinnitus. He threw his hands over his ears as he fell to the ground for cover. The female demon had done much the same, scrambling next to him at the doorstep of the locomotive. The male, however, struggled to get up from several paces away where he had been flung onto his behind. Quickly, Shepard realized that the male beast had not only been shot and survived the hit, but his pistol had been flung to only the lord knew where.

That left one pistol on the demonette, with who knew how many rounds, his own pistol, a revolver with six, and his unknown guardian angel, who hopefully had a revolver or percussion pistol of his own. The Kentucky rifle that his benefactor had fired couldn't be reloaded in time to be of any further help, although it might make a decent club or spear.

Without a further moment's hesitation, John drew his revolver and pistol-whipped the creature next to him before she could bring a hand to her back where she kept her own. He should have shot her, he realized, but he couldn't bring himself to do that to a lady, even a demonic one.

Ankle pain be damned, he began running to the sound of the shot, but found himself inexplicably slowed after the first few yards of freedom. As he struggled forward to no avail, he found himself surrounded by a bright blue corona. It held him in place, unable to move or even draw a bead on his abductors, and lifted him up, slowly pulling his drifting body back to the locomotive.

Magic. Until now, John had been wondering why they were using common, if strange, technological mechanisms to do their deeds. He had almost begun to question whether or not they were demons at all, and not some heathen lost tribe of terribly ugly four-eyed people. Now he knew. Perhaps, like a good run, it strained these things to use their demonic magic, and so they opted to hold it in reserve.

The demonette leaned against the doorway as she made exaggerated pulling and lifting motions in his direction, with soft blue pops of light crackling from her hands and fingertips. The male demon returned to her side, kicking his booted feet through dried, dead, leaves around her, searching for his missing handgun. John marveled at how the thing kept one set of eyes searching the ground, while the other set stared at his partner, adding its expressions to the gurgling and grumbling noises of their conversation.

"Nun yunu wi!"

All three heads and a total of ten eyes turned to the new sound, more than ten yards closer to them than the shot fired seconds ago. A figure dashed out from behind a large spindle-bush, a tomahawk held at the ready in its right hand, a Kentucky rifle dangling in its left, running straight for the pair of demons like a pouncing wolf.

"Stone Spirits! You'll not take this one!"

It was one of Battalion's Indian Scouts, Shepard realized. He vaguely remembered him as a Cherokee from South Carolina named Alenko, though, as their de facto leader, everyone always call him Chief. He had never seen him in combat, but, being a Scout and learned in the art of hidden reconnaissance, Shepard figured that was the point. Regardless, against these things, he was about to end up dead. If the demon could stand up to a fifty-eight caliber rifled slug, then it would damn sure shrug off a hatchet to the neck, no matter how many of Alenko's shamans had blessed it.

Shepard's conclusion made the demon's reactions all the more surprising. As they realized exactly what the enraged native intended, to part their heads from their bodies, they reacted with as much fear as any mortal alive. The male, all four eyes wide in terror, jumped through the doorway and into the air-train, grabbing his partner in the process. As if giving an invisible rope a mighty tug, she used the blue demon-magic to launch John into the steel structure with her.

He hit the inside wall with as much force as a horse at full gallop.

That was the last thing John Shepard remembered before the world went black.

...

"What... Where... Damn."

John struggled to his feet- one of them still very painful- to stare directly down the barrel of an unusual, of unmistakable, long rifle. The male held it from a good ten paces away, standing down a long corridor, far outside the maximum distance where John might be able to knock the weapon aside.

Demonette stood close with her pistol still at the ready, but not so close that John felt comfortable disarming her either, especially not with the male demon on over-watch. Looking between the two creatures, waiting for instructions, John caught the quick shine of reflected light as the muzzle of Demonette's pistol dashed his face, painfully tearing his upper lip on his teeth.

"There," she said, "Now we're even, Primate."

He glared up at her, debating whether or not to spit his blood in her face. Chivalry warred with anger before he noticed that she had a matching tear on her upper lip from where his Remington had much the same effect on her. It trailed the color of sickly orange bile down her chin, flowing even more than his wound, thanks to her far sharper teeth. He had to admit, fair was fair.

On the other hand, he was still their prisoner, and that had yet to be fully addressed. If a bullet couldn't hurt them, but a tomahawk and a pistol-whip could, that opened possibilities. Perhaps, if he got the jump on the pair, he could even beat them to death. Neither seemed super-humanly strong. He began licking up upper lip, sucking in the copper-tasting fluid, wondering what would happen if he angered them enough.

"Spit on me and I'll cut your testicles off," said the woman, "And then spit right back at you."

John rolled his eyes and swallowed. "Where's Alenko, the guy who was gonna scalp you?"

Demonette smiled, "About two hundred thousand ... below us. Don't worry about him, worry about yourself. Let's get you to a cell."

John wasn't very good at thinking in terms of large numbers. Whatever magic they used to speak to him in English had gone silent on the unit of measurement, but two hundred thousand of anything up in the sky meant a fall that would kill him. He was along for the ride, at least until he figured out how to control this iron horse. He smiled at the female and began shuffling in the direction she had nodded, presumably to his cell.

"You know, Ju'lee, I was going to house him alone, or with the female salarian," said the male, "Because he was being so cooperative. But now... I think he needs to understand that here, his actions will have consequences. I'm tired of my merchandise causing us problems. He's a mammal. Lets put the mammals together."

"But Tarrak... We haven't given her animal protein in a week," said the female.

The male, Tarrak, shrugged. "I like his odds. Besides, we can always step in if she goes too far."

"He's no good to us half-eaten."

"I really don't think she could half of him." Tarrak looked thoughtful before continuing, "Not in one sitting, anyway."

"Wait..." said John, "I can't put up a fight. Not up here in the sky. What would I do if I won? I'll do whatever you want. It's over, I'm done resisting."

"You're right, you're done," said Tarrak. He gestured with his rifle in the opposite direction from where the female had first been taking him.

The female gave John a shove from behind with the muzzle of her pistol, digging hard into his shoulder blade. He staggered forward a step before stopping.

"You can't seriously feed me to some predator," he said, trying to smile, "This is a joke, right? You're not serious, are you? Why would you abduct me just to kill me?"

"I don't know," said Tarrak, "Why would I? She's hardly any bigger than you, anyway. If she gets too close, just swing at her."

"Mountain lions aren't any bigger than me, either!"

A bolt of pain shot through him when he was hit with the barrel of a pistol for the second time.

"Move it!"

...

John had hesitated the moment the metal door slid to the side- seemingly on its own accord- to reveal a pitch-black room. That's when one of the two demons, Tarrak or Ju'lee, shoved him face first into what he hoped was a large enough room and closed the door behind him. His bad foot hit the ground hard in an effort to correct his momentum, pain causing him to crumple under his own weight.

Just before his nose hit the floor, he could swear he heard a gasp.

Like a cannon shot, he was sitting up and scooting away from the noise as fast as his injury would allow, or faster, since the movement sent more fire shooting through his body. If he wasn't more careful, it might become permanent. Of course, if he didn't get away from whatever that thing was, he'd be dead, and that was permanent too.

He glanced around the blackness, eyes squinting and searching left to right. There was the faintest trace of light in the room, he noticed, but it did him no good whatsoever. Slowly he brought his hands up to his face, elbows close together in front of his stomach, the better to guard his vitals and eyes, should he ever get to use them again.

He began to think he had imagined the gasp. He thought perhaps his captors had been lying. Of course they would never put anyone they'd risked their lives to acquire in a position to be killed and eaten, hopefully in that order. He was at least a little more valuable than cattle-feed, he imagined.

And then the eyes opened.

On the other side of the room, a pair of bright white orbs hung in the middle of the inky-black room, almost level with his from where he sat. They were so bright as to almost blind him... They drew him in... Captivated him...

With a shock of realization, he slammed his own eyes shut. He had heard of beasts like this, snakes that could stare at hare or rat, keep it fixated like a statue until they could make their way within striking distance. He squeezed his eyes closed even harder. They were doing him no good, anyway.

His heart raced and pounded in his throat, struggling to keep time with his rapid breathing. Dealing with confederates was one thing, but exotic demon-predators? That was beyond his training as a Soldier. Even a mountain lion, a regular lion, or a tiger would have been preferable... But whatever had those eyes... It was nothing he was familiar with.

Above the pounding of his heart and the bellows in his chest, he heard it. It's breathing. And it was close.

Keeping his hands where they were, up and about a eighteen inches in front of his face, he thought furiously. Just because an animal was hungry, didn't mean it would eat _anything_. It wouldn't try to eat something inanimate or poisonous... At least not at the beginning stages of starvation, anyway.

A hot, moist breath tickled his neck and cheeks in time to its slow, even breathing. Of course it's breathing was even; of what harm could a blind and lame man be to a supernatural huntress?

The breath moved from the left side of his face, around his nose and lips, to the right side. It pulled away, so he almost couldn't hear it, them came close, so close to his collar bone and neck that he marveled at how the creature hadn't touched him yet. It repeated the pattern several times, each time coming even closer, becoming a bit more bold, and _sniffing_. The thing was actually sniffing him, again and again.

He took the opportunity to smell the creature as well, and found its scent to be almost pleasant. It held a cloying sweetness, like honey and cinnamon, unlike anything he had smelled outside the confines of the finest bakeries in Philadelphia or Baltimore. Her strong musk lingered wherever she moved, agitated and accelerated by her heady breath. If this was her scent, judging by the strength of it, it was clear she hadn't bathed or done any personal hygiene in ages, if demon-beasts were prone to such civilized necessities.

And if he smelled half as good to her as she did to him, he was a dead man.

He realized that the demon-cat making her decision, although it seemed she was in no hurry to do so, which was a good thing. That meant he was at least questionable as a meal, and no one and no thing would eat questionable food unless they _really_ had to. But the way she kept sniffing, so close to him, to his lips, his face... Did she think he was food or not? Or something else? If he only opened his eyes just a little...

He heard feet hitting pacing over the metal floor.

Illumination poured in all around him with unnaturally sudden haste and intensity, blinding him even through his _closed _eye lids.

He heard a chirping, meowing speech from a few yards away at about the same time the light surrounded him, also noticing the thing's breath was no longer at his ear. The voice was quick, feminine, annoyed if he had to guess, and as much unlike the grumbling of the four-eyed demons as his own. Unfortunately, it lacked the metallic-toned English that the other demons also spoke.

He kept his eyes closed as he thought of how best to respond. If it expected a certain answer or call in response, he would do well to give it the correct one.

He very quickly understood the reason why that mystical sorcery of a second English voice would be denied to Demon-Cat. If she were not intelligent, there would be no sense to the words. If she was, then she was a prisoner just as he was, and they would do well to ensure they not communicate easily, lest they work together on an escape.

He heard Demon-Cat give the same call, only slightly louder this time and more annoyed. Giving a mental shrug, he opened his eyes.

Suddenly, he didn't feel quite as worried about getting eaten as he once was.

The concept of this person being a 'beast' fled his mind immediately. Demon-Cat stood by the prison door, leaning near a nodule on the wall. She was _definitely_ a woman, though probably also a demon. _But mostly a woman._

The first thing that caught his eyes were _hers_, those entrancing orbs that glowed like white hot embers, staring directly at him in a way that told him she was both puzzled and bemused. He could have guessed more of her expression, except for the shawl she kept draped over her head and wrapped around to cover her face like an Ottoman princess. He hoped it was more of a demonic fashion or religious statement rather than her way of telling him that he stunk or thought him to be a leper.

The second thing were her the loose-fitting filthy rags that passed for her clothes. She wore a set of thin, baggy pants the color of plain wool, but far, far thinner. The shirt appeared much the same, tailored of that thin, billowy, white material. He saw no seems or buttons of any kind on either of them, so he could only wonder as to their construction. Those garments had been torn in what had to have been a struggle of some sort, with strips of fabric hanging down in odd places. Other sections of mismatched fabric- hewed from some of her bed linens he noticed- were tied together over the holes in a vain attempt to cover the poor girl's skin.

Near the rips there were parts of the white fabric stained with blood, indistinguishable from human blood, in much the same way as he had seen on innumerable of his own soldiers. His thoughts immediately fell to those four-eyed monstrosities who might have done this to the girl. At that moment he resolved to do them harm a thousand fold greater than what she had experienced, regardless of whether Demon-Cat ended up eating half of him or not. And if he should find out that they sullied her honor in the process, then they would find the eternal damnation and suffering of Hell to be a far more comforting and pleasant abode than the living arrangements they would find under his care.

Though she wore a shawl, it was not quite long enough, in his estimation. Her hair, full, modestly curly, and as black as midnight, reached halfway down her back, the latter half of her tresses exposed to the light of day when perhaps they should not have been. He imagined that if the intent of her clothing had been to cover her hair and it wasn't doing a very good job of it at the moment. He could tell that she may have once cared for her locks, but at the moment it appeared unkempt, stringy, and caked with something he could only in the vainest sense hope wasn't blood.

He noticed more of the otherworldly about her. Not only her eyes, but her hands and feet were different; both demonic and predatory. She wore gloves over hands that had only a pair of fingers and a thumb each, all larger than man's. On her feet, poorly shod in makeshift sandals, were only two exceptionally large toes with...

Three inch long claws. There weren't terribly curved, but they looked menacingly sharp. With a strong pair of legs, she might disembowel a man in a single swipe or kick. Fortunately, she didn't seem too apt to do that at the moment, though he had to remind himself that involuntary confinement and hunger could do strange things to a person.

She might have had a third toe as well, on the outside of her feet like a cat or dog's dew claw, but he couldn't tell from where he sat.

He could see parts of her skin as well, through the torn fabric, despite her best efforts at repair. What he had first taken to be an exotic, dark, East-Indian tone, was in fact far more exotic than that. The color of her skin fell somewhere between violet and regal purple, perhaps lavender could describe it best.

She mumbled something in her chirping language and turned to the side, covering the small bits of exposed flesh with her hands. He noticed her downcast eyes, and a frown on her barely visible eyebrows. She must have seen him peeking, though he could have hardly imagined a portion of her shoulder and knee to be terribly taboo to expose.

This was a modest demon indeed.

He hastened to reassure her of his purely gentlemanly intentions.

Standing, he straightened his uniform and addressed the girl. "My apologies, Miss," he suddenly found himself oddly hoping this demon didn't have a demon-husband somewhere, "But I meant no disrespect. You see, we don't get too many women like you in these parts."

She looked at him askance. He had little doubt that his words meant nothing to her.

He took a step closer to her and scratched the back of his neck. "Not that that's a bad thing, mind you, you're just different. In a good way."

He took another step closer and waited for the lady to offer her hand. And waited. And waited some more.

"Well, I see that ladies don't offer their hands to gentleman where you're from," he said. Pointing to himself, he began introductions anyway, "The name is John Shepard, Captain, First Maryland Volunteers. And you are?"

She pointed to him. "Shepard?"

"Yes," he nodded.

"John'Shepard firs Marlan'Volunturs," she said, pointing to him again.

"Yes, you got it," he said, nodding. He gestured to Demon-Cat. "And you are?"

She pointed to herself. "Tali'Zorah nar Rayya."

**Please review. **

**Let me know about your thoughts on introducing Fem!Shep at some point, or whether I should continue this beyond three or four chapters. Believe me, as counter-intuitive as this sounds, writing this is good for Warrior Ethos. **


	2. Goodbye Blue Sky

**Kaelas17 - I'm glad you think the characters are 'in character' because I struggled with it a lot. I couldn't make Shep 100% like he is in the game because that wouldn't be appropriate to an Army officer of the 19th century, but I could come close without too much effort. Still, it concerned me. As for Garrus, well, he is a cop, so that's possible, isn't it? And a return trip to earth might also be possible. About half the crew is human, and we've only got one accounted for at the moment.**

**sproino - I'm glad to hear from you and I hope I deliver. I learned something new today, ha ha. If it comes up again, I'mm make the correction.**

**Anon - Thank you, my friend. I'm glad you decided to check it out. I hope you continue to read and review. This sort of transition isn't easy for me because, frankly, I've never done it before and I'm not even sure what a peace-time Army is supposed to look like. **

**ArchReaperN7 - It's wonderful to hear from you, my distinguished friend. It's not quite a western, really, although I think there might be some elements of that. Wasn't there a movie with the guy who plays James Bond about aliens in the old west? It's not gonna be too much like that. More like "The Magnificent Seven" (or "The Seven Samurai") in space. And there might be more than seven...**

**Facemelter - Yes! I am not dead, yet; just a little overwhelmed at the moment and completely lacking in inspiration. It is true, dextro doesn't mean death in terms of biology. Lol, that thread was canon, I believe, wasn't it? And I heard that too. I'm no scientician, but it made sense to me. I think it was addictive, too. I might use that in my main-line fic. It's very heartening to hear from you, my friend.**

**MumblesSKS - Thank you. I hope my chapters continue to please.**

**lunchmeat5000 - Thanks! I think maybe in hindsight, maybe calling this story a "Western" is a misnomer on my part. Is a Western In Space still a western? What side of the galaxy is the Perseus Veil on again?**

**...**

**Chapter 2: Goodbye Blue Sky**

**...**

_The funny thing about solitary confinement_, Tali thought, _is what you look forward to._

She had two highlights in her day, each day, every day, and those were her morning and afternoon meals. Not for the food itself, which was nothing but vegetable matter and carbohydrates, or the drink, chemically sterilized water, but for the company.

Twice a day, the door would open and she would see her captors. The female batarian, a biotic, would have a hand at the ready to pin her in the air or throw her against the wall should the need arise, and the male would toss a food tray at her feel, inevitably flinging some on the floor. They rarely spoke except to give her the odd order, but that didn't mean Tali also kept quiet. Though she hadn't done it recently, she used to hurl insults and threats whenever possible, calling them useless sacks of living excrement and informing them that Her Majesty's Royal Navy would not hesitate to blow them out of the void, even with her aboard, among other choice comments.

The latter she knew to be true. Her Majesty did not pay ransoms or pull any punches when it came to criminals, even when an admiral's daughter was threatened. For that, she felt grateful. She would rather see her captors dead than be back home, and that said a lot. That didn't mean that Rannoch wasn't going to attempt alternatives first. She half expected a squad of Royal Marine commandos to come blasting through her cell door at any moment.

But in four months, they hadn't come.

She would have guessed it had been far longer than that, closer to three years, but for the marks she scrawled on the wall with the disgusting paste they claimed to be edible. One for each day, she found herself counting and recounting them by the hour, just to be sure, just to remind herself of how long she had been in that cell. She often swore that her captors had been erasing her earlier marks, just to confuse her, just to make her think that she hadn't been here as long as it felt.

A while back, she had redone the first few marks in an unusual shape, so she knew they were hers, and that _those_ were the first. Then she had begun to wonder if the batarians hadn't erased those and made the next marks to look like the first ones. So then she had decided to count them all, erase them all, and make a new set of marks of equal number, beginning from a known starting point. It had cost her almost a full meal's rations, such as it was, but the marks now began at the corner of her cell. That had gone well for a few days before she had started to realize that her captors were now secretly rearranging the twin bunks and toilet to change which corner of the cell she had started with.

_Now if only I could figure out how they kept moving the door too, that would be great._

In her more lucid moments, she would sometimes remember that if her captors really wanted to, all they had to do was erase the marks entirely and tell her to go pound sand if she complained. There was nothing stopping them from doing so, and no reason to try and trick her. That they didn't was about the only thing she had to be grateful to them for.

She didn't like those moments, the sane ones, because the galaxy never seemed so bleak. More importantly, she never felt so alone. For a race as social as quarians, solitary confinement was a sick kind of torture, not practiced since the worst days of the absolute monarchy of Arra the Conqueror over a thousand years ago, and then only sparingly. If left long enough in that state, the mind began its slow descent into madness, sanity's death rattle, where it tried to fill in the gaps of existence with it's own invention. Eventually, she would no longer be able to tell reality from fantasy at all and it would become permanent, her mind's death complete.

And yet, at times like now, when her thoughts were as clear as they could be, she looked forward to it.

In her less lucid moments, which were becoming more and more frequent these days, her friends came to visit her. Her family too.

Her younger sister came to toss the _nis'harna_ back and forth and tell her all about how well she was doing on the team, only a freshmen but starting every game.

Her younger brother would visit and she'd help him with his science fair project, a demonstration of macro-quantum transcendence theory in action.

Her friend Olasie always showed up at about three, right after classes, with a pair of gaming data pads. They would spend hours on Galaxy Wars: The Old Monarchy, losing complete track of time until they got too hungry to concentrate.

Her loving mother and father would then announce themselves and stay to help them cook something wonderful.

They'd all have dinner together then, a huge feast, freshly killed _malirac _with all the trimmings and a dozen different cuts of _sturma_. Blushing, she'd ask her parents for a glass of wine with dinner, her first adult drink ever, in celebration for getting her acceptance letter into the Royal Navy's applied physics doctoral program. Her father would refuse to give her even a sip, of course, but her mother would have no problem convincing him otherwise.

And then she would blink, sit back down on her bunk, put her head in her hands, and remember just how alone she really was.

Before, the batarians used to let her out whenever she wanted to socialize in the prisoners' common area or to work on the ship. Although it keep her busy, she had a few qualms about repairing a slaver ship. That's how she found herself in her current situation. Now, she sat, or mostly slept, in her cell for twenty hours a day, ten days a week, without ever being let out.

What she wouldn't give for someone to talk to. Or more importantly, to listen to. There was nothing here, nothing to read, nothing to see, and nothing to do. She would give anything for just one conversation or to hear one story. Anything. Someone she could say _I'm alive, I still exist_ to. Here she was forgotten, damned to the realm of lost souls. Here, she didn't exist as part of the living or the ancestors. Here, she was nothing.

_The afternoon meal is coming early...?_

She thought it before registering why such a thing should occur to her. Then she heard it, felt the vibrations through the deck plates, and recognized the approach of footsteps towards her cell.

This time, they sounded different. A few more paces came and went before she realized why. There was a third person with the batarians, louder and heavier than either of them. When they stopped at her cell door, she quickly cut off the lights to the cell and hid in a corner.

Moving that quickly strained her... Biology was not her strong suit, but she knew that without any animal protein in her diet, her body had become malnourished. Vegetable matter lacked a key enzyme that all quarians needed to survive, and she had been without it for going on three months now, since the _incident_, when her solitary confinement began. To make matters worse, her normally perfect night vision had begun to depart along with her strength and sanity.

Light flooded the cell with the sliding doorway, obscured only by the three quarian-sized silhouettes. Though her vision had trouble adjusting to the light, she could just make out the familiar male and female batarians flanking a strange, larger center figure. She had never seen anything like him before. And yet...

It immediately struck her how _similar _to herhe looked. He had hair, but he wasn't a quarian. Many garden worlds that harbored life eventually developed some kind of mammal analogue, but none seen had ever been intelligent, save for one particular species native to Rannoch. Much of the galaxy even theorized intelligent creatures that regulated their body temperature, nursed their under-developed young, and extruded long chains of dead, hardened protein from all over their body could never be intelligent. Combining all those energy-intensive traits with a large, resource-hungry brain, in a body large enough to carry it, just demanded too much for any species to be successful. Quarians, they said, were an anomaly resulting from an ancient asteroid impact event, one that left only Rannoch's mammals alive.

The unknown male's hands had five fingers each, like a batarian or an asari. His legs were like theirs too, and his eyes were just as dull. He had no _faysakt _that she could see, though with him silhouetted like that, she couldn't tell for sure. Beyond all that though, _he could have been quarian_.

He was tall for a quarian, but she wasn't one to comment; there were always outliers like her. She had paid the price for being different growing up, and continued to do so, to a degree, always slouching to hide her height. He stood a head taller than the average quarian, making him a few centimeters taller than herself. It was quite unusual to see a male that tall, and she couldn't help but entertain some possibilities the instant she saw him.

_Is he some kind of asari-quarian hybrid? I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way._

Above all, given that she hadn't seen a man she didn't _desperately _want to kill in three whole months, she realized he was a _he_. While she could freely admit that her interest in the opposite sex had been a bit stronger than most, Tali could swear that she had never seen a man this attractive in her life. Then again, a small part of her brain reminded her that that was probably the extreme loneliness and sexual frustration talking. Not only that, but it was hard to push past the unmistakable impression that it was an _unmasked _male quarian, face as bare to the world as the day he was born, who was-

-Being shoved into her cell.

She let out a loud gasp as he fell face-first to her feet. Her toes splayed out, claws curled to scrape the deck, and legs tensed beneath her, she prepared to pounce on the female who pushed him and rip her digestive system from her torso. She almost made the jump, despite her condition, when the door slammed shut. It was purely a gut reaction and a very stupid idea. Yet another fight with the captors in her state of health would not end well.

She had to shove the seething rage deep down inside and let it go. She was not so cynical yet, even after all she had been through, as to think someone else's suffering wasn't her problem. She knew that she owed this man nothing, nothing worth getting herself beaten-up over, leastwise, but that amounted to nil as far as she was concerned. Some things just weren't right, sometimes people needed someone to stand up for them, and that was worth fighting for.

She watched him climb to a seating position and scoot away from her, backing himself against the far wall. She got a good look at him when they locked gazes, noticing not for the first time how expressive his alien eyes could be. In them she saw fear, just before eyelids slammed shut. He brought his hands up; some kind gesture she did not recognize, perhaps asking for help, expressing fear, or signaling exhaustion. By the look of him, it certainly could have been any of the above. If it weren't such a pointless act, and wouldn't hurt so much, she would have banged her fists on the door in a rage for what the slavers must have done to the man to make him so terrified. She immediately vowed to make them pay, when the opportunity presented itself.

She stood on wobbly legs and made her way over to the man, taking a seat beside him, crossing her legs beneath her. She wanted to touch him, to hold him, to at least straighten the hair that fell over his face, but she did not. That would be _highly _inappropriate for someone she just met. Instead, she leaned in to examine him more carefully. He looked like he could have been a pale asari-quarian hybrid alright, an unnatural experiment in genetics gone horribly right. Either that or his was a newly discovered species. With what the salarians had been know to accomplish, each seemed as likely as the other. What she also received from her examination was a nose-full of the best, and most conflicting, smell in the world.

He smelled like an herbivore, like food, like _prey_, and it was _delicious. _When his lips parted just a bit, in addition to getting a funny feeling down below, she could see why this might be. His front teeth were so flat they could be used as a straight-edge. He might have been hiding some decent canines back there, but she highly doubted it. Although there was also a hint of something contradictory buried deep down in his scent, his sweat definitely had the aromatic smell of someone who'd been been eating carbohydrates and plant matter for weeks. Much like hers probably did, had she been able to detect her own stink.

On the other side of the coin, overwhelming the scent of a fresh meal by at least two fold, he smelled of _sex_. She considered that idea for a moment before concluding that, no, he didn't smell like that, because she had never smelled that before. At least not what it smelled like for a man, anyway. No, he smelled like something that made her _want _to have sex. With him_._

And that was entirely unexpected. Sure, he was handsome and exotic, but nothing too special in the looks department. But the smell... She made a mental tally in the half-asari column. Everyone knew that they had an allure that seemed to attract every race, no matter how different from themselves. Although none of them had ever smelled this good.

Tali came to the embarrassed realization that she'd been sniffing this confused, abducted, and injured man for almost five minutes straight. She pulled away, ashamed, and began kneading her fingers together absentmindedly in quiet contemplation. She blamed her disrespectful behavior on him and how he somehow made her both horny and hungry.

How he made her hungry _especially _confused her, as the thought of cannibalizing any sentient, let alone this man in particular, made her physically ill. That was the absolute _last_ thing she could possibly do to him, but certainly seeing how his skin tasted, there, in the crook of his neck by his collar bone, couldn't hurt, could it?

She gave a fretful and disgusted sigh. Without knowing it, she had leaned to within centimeters of the man and had almost licked his neck. Not only that, but she had been that way, thinking it over and smelling him, for another pair of minutes.

_Smooooth, girl. You're not a weirdo at all. 'Hi, I know I just met you and all, but I'm going to lick you now, 'kay? Right on your naked neck. It's how we full-blooded quarians say hello.' Good thing he still has his eyes shut._

After pulling herself away again, she cocked her head to the side and thought. Not only were his eyes still closed, but his hand were still up and head hadn't moved, except for the heaving of his chest.

Standing slowly, she shambled her way to the room's light switch and thumbed it on. "Um, hello, Sir, are you okay?" she asked.

He turned his head to the sound of her voice, but beyond that, he gave no sign of understanding and hadn't moved a muscle. Had he not had a translator implanted?

Slightly concerned, she repeated her question again, only louder and slower.

This time he opened his eyes. A stunning set of expressive, blue, eyes. He sat like that for a moment, staring at her, and she couldn't help but smile at him. She wished he could see it, but her veil stayed in place. Sure, it would probably mean nothing to him for her to remove it, but to her it sent a certain signal of intimacy. She'd seen more bare-chested asari in her life than unmasked quarians- an order of magnitude more, unfortunately, since attending a turian friend's bachelorette party a year ago.

The man got to his feet, tugged on his clothing to straighten it, and barked at her. Several times.

She cocked her head to the side.

_What the _der'vak _did he just say? There's no way that's a _Khelish _dialect. Or any other language in the galaxy._

She took a good look at more than just his barren face then. The more she examined his odd clothing, the symbols on it, the manufacture style, and the boots he wore, the more she realized that his represented an entirely new culture, a primitive one at that. By what he wore, he might have been taken from a quarian painting from half a millennium ago. Before her was not a hybrid of any kind, but an entirely new species of sentient.

He took a step closer to her and began scratching be back of his neck before barking at her some more. Her smile broadened, but she still had no clue as to what he was trying to tell her. She suddenly realized that didn't matter though. In all the commotion of his arrival, her reaction to his treatment, and then her reaction to him, she had forgotten to take into account one simple and irrefutable fact.

_I'm not alone any more!_

He took yet another step closer to her, one that looked pained, and she found herself wanting to immediately close the gap and hug him as hard as her diminished strength would allow. Again, she had to remind herself that this was not how one greeted people they just met.

He stood there looking expectantly and waiting.

He was wanting her to do something. Tali though furiously about what it might be, but drew a blank. When he looked away, ever so slightly dejected, she cursed herself for not understanding him or not thinking fast enough or both.

Then he smiled at her and pointed to himself. She could understand this. Whatever came next would be his name.

More barking.

She nodded more to herself than to him, picking out one of the barks that seemed to have added emphasis.

She pointed to him. "Shepard?"

Them man nodded and smiled wider. It occurred to her that she liked seeing that. She struggled to remember a few more of the barks she had just heard, suspecting that he had given her his full name.

She kept her finger pointing, her index finger bobbing as she spoke, "John'Shepard firs Marlin'Volunturs?"

He nodded again, smiling wide enough to show a small set of four canines. It made her do the same.

He pointed at her and barked.

She quickly duplicated the gesture, pointing to herself, enunciating her name, "I'm Tali'Zorah nar Rayya"

...

Tarak spun in his command chair, idly checking the control panel for the ship's special housing units, rooms designed to hold troublesome merchandise and those with biotic abilities, in between paragraphs of an elcor fantasy novel. In person, they conversed terribly, but they wrote at a level on par with any of the galaxy's races, if not exceeding it. Putting the datapad down, he glanced at the ship's chronometer and sighed. They still had another thirty minutes before traveling far enough out of the planet's gravity well to prevent stressing the FTL engines, then another few minutes before hitting the system's relay.

He turned his attention back to the control panel for the special housing and brought up a display of the rooms. In the upper left of the two-dimensional projection, a huge krogan male, a battlemaster of some renown who was worth a lot of money to someone, sharpened a scale he had pried from somewhere off his body to use as a makeshift weapon. He should have been smart enough to know that they could see him doing it, but the creature likely didn't care. Tarrak made a mental note to deal with the bounty hunter by shutting off the water to his cell until he passed out from dehydration. Then he could move in to safely collect whatever implement the krogan busily crafted.

The screen to the right of the krogan showed a female turian, a cabalist turned mercenary, managing to appear both elegant and dangerous in her red face paint as she paced back and forth in her cell. A powerful asari matriarch had placed a price on the woman's head for her safe return to somewhere in the Omega Nebula. The contract didn't specify any of the reasons behind it, but rumors had it that the two were lovers and the asari had been abusive, prompting the turian to run. Not his problem.

The projection below the krogan's displayed an empty cell, while the one below the turian showed two occupants, two _suspiciously calm_ occupants. Tarrak sat up in his seat and gestured Ju'lee over to look at the screen.

"See, I told you she wasn't going to eat him," he said.

"She looks almost happy in there," said his second, using a thumb and forefinger to zoom in on the young quarian's face. "These primatives are the friendly sort, I guess. And he adapted pretty quick for someone that's never seen another race before."

The angle of the camera was inopportune, high and from slightly behind, but the girl's expression was unmistakable.

"Good," he said, "Now maybe she won't try so hard to blow up my ship."

He pondered for a moment on his second's words. From the time he met the alien, its reactions had been logical, well thought out, and almost ordinary for someone being abducted at gunpoint. Even the other primitive he'd come across had reacted about as he might have expected from any member of advanced race defending one of their own. There had been no screaming and running about as one might have seen in the vids.

"This one did adapt pretty well," he muttered before turning to his second, "We _are_ sitting on an eezo mine here, Ju'lee. Change of plans. I think I'm going to call our contact in the Republic. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to get a few more of these primitives before we hit the relay."

He tapped a few haptic controls on the display to his right, bringing up a comm window. Within a few moments, a rather harried looking asari appeared on the screen in two dimensions.

"Yes, what?" the asari hissed.

"I think I can get more merchandise," he said, "They seem pretty level-headed and have adapted well. I'm sending you a holo of the first subject now. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised."

He waited a few moments, watching the asari on the display. The moment he saw her eyes widen and mouth gape, he knew he'd made the right decision.

"This is a _male_?" she asked.

"Yup."

"This could be an asari," she said.

"I know. A male asari."

"You don't understand," she said, "Feminine asari would go nuts for this. This could be like having a male quarian, but without all the trouble. They don't _bond_ do they?"

"They have no comm signals to look at," he said, "But, based on what we've observed from orbit and on ground, I'd say not."

"Good. Get me two more males, and at least as many females. Make sure they're in good condition and of breeding age."

Tarrak frowned. "I don't think making your own population is a wise idea," he said.

"Don't worry, you'll be long dead before their genetic diversity is large enough to make your importation services obsolete," she said.

He shook his head. "No, seriously, that's going to attract too much attention. I don't think it's a wise idea to-"

"Add a pair of zeros to this one's price. That's how much I'm offering you eight of these things."

"Deal."

With that, his asari contact cut the connection.

"Set course back to that mud-ball," he said. A helmsman nodded. Tarrak then leaned back in his chair and sighed. "It's time fore their evening meal, isn't it?"

Ju'lee nodded. "Yes. Same meals?"

"Yup. This'll be interesting."

...

Tali turned from her and Shepard's game of hand signs to face the door. Someone was coming.

They had been sitting together on the bottom bunk, her bunk, and she realized that for the first time in months, she had actually lost track of time. She was about due for her evening meal and she hadn't even noticed. She had been laughing and smiling with Shepard for a good two hours, maybe more, and it felt like only a quarter of that time had passed.

Months ago, when the solitary confinement began, she would have stood up to greet her guests when they entered. Maybe she would have played a trick or two on them or hurled some insults their way, but recently she had been getting far too week to waste her energy on reminding them that she could still make their lives miserable. She could, and probably would, die from malnutrition eventually, but by limiting her activity she might last long enough to be sold to someone who would feed her properly. That was her only hope.

She didn't conserve energy just to live, however; that was incidental. Truthfully, the thought of death didn't bother her that much. She kept going not for fear of death, but for fear of dying like this. The fleeting concept of justice for some batarian slavers helped too.

She tucked her feet up beneath her, between her thighs and the thin mattress. Shepard noticed the change in her posture and attention only a second or two before their captors arrived, turning to face it just as the door opened. His hearing must not have been as acute as hers, she realized.

The female batarian entered first, hands aglow. Tali smiled weakly. The quarian's pitiful defiance had had an effect. She hadn't done a thing to those _bosh'tets_ in three weeks and still they insisted on entering her cell like they were clearing a room. The woman had no need of her biotics on this day either, unless of course Shepard planned something.

Almost as soon as she considered the possibility, the _a__merican_, as she had learned his people were called, jumped to his feet and stood in front of her, his leg clearly still hurting, effectively obscuring her behind his bulk. She cocked her head to the side. _Is he protecting me from them? _

It was noble, but stupid. The man could get himself killed. She brought a hand to his suit jacket, curling her fingers into the fabric, intent on pulling him out of the line of fire before she even realized what she was doing. That had been rather forward of her... Or had it been? He was a friend, wasn't he? And if was going to get himself blasted in the face, she owed it to him to pull him out of the way, didn't she?

She began planning out how she might execute a trip-and-pull maneuver when a depressing thought occurred to her. He stood right in front of her, so no matter where she pulled him, she would end up being on the receiving end of whatever biotic nastiness had been aimed his way. In effect, it was either him or her. The choice wasn't nearly as hard as it seemed. She may or may not end up dead from a biotic blast, but without someone to talk to, she wouldn't want to be alive.

Fortunately for both of them, he made no immediate aggressive actions and neither did the batarians. She kept her hand in place, locked in his clothing, just in case that changed, all the while eyeing the batarian woman for a raised hand or the tell-tale flash from a biotic flare up.

After staring at Shepard carefully, and trying to get a good look at Tali behind him, the female nodded and the male stepping into the room. In his hands he held a pair of food trays, one in each. The one in his right contained her normal fare; nothing to get excited about and so bland that she could barely smell it. Or rather, she could barely smell it over what he held in his left hand, a tray piled with twice her normal rations, a huge portion of which was deliciously enticing meat.

Into Shepard's hand the batarian thrust the meat-laden tray and, stepping around the american, the slaver unceremoniously dumped the paste-covered tray into her lap.

Shepard barked loudly at the slaver, causing him to jump back. Blue flashed across the female's hands, but Shepard held his ground. Tali took up the slack in his jacket, ready to kick his legs out from under him in an instant.

"I can do whatever I want, _human_," said the male batarian, "This is my ship."

Tali should not have been surprised as she was to hear Shepard's language barking out along with the batarian's words. It seemed that the four-eyed pair wore external translators with a speaker set-up, just to the right of center on their chest plates, to accommodate their newest acquisition. That meant their universal translators had been programmed with her friend's language. She moved that to the top of her list of things to hack into, firmly above the ship's comm system and its guidance controls.

The 'human' barked again.

"Why should I be?" asked the slaver, "She wasn't showing any common courtesy when she tried to blow up this ship with everyone in it. That's right, she almost killed over a dozen innocents along with my crew and I. You could take a lesson from that. Beware the nice ones."

_How __**dare**__ he?! _Bosh'tet! _You don't know me, you bastard son of a whore!_

Tali leaned in, about to stand and kick the man as hard as she could in the shin, when Shepard barked back in deafening shout. It terrified her to hear, but strangely, she found she enjoyed it. Despite that, she found herself glued to her seat.

"Yeah, well, you think that now," the batarian said with a smile, "Let's see if dinner changes your mind."

Both batarians turned and left the room, taking the tension with them.

Shepard returned to his seat on the bed beside her, placing the tray in his lap. He looked at her expectantly, but only for an instant, before turning back to his meal.

Tali had already plunged a finger into her paste, licking it under her veil distastefully, when she realized that Shepard had head bowed over his food. He appeared to be murmuring to himself, eyes closed, palms clapped together. She suddenly felt the strangest and most home-sickness inducing guilt wash over her, recalling instantly all those times when her family would visit their very religious aunt Shala's house for dinner.

Her immediate family never prayed at home- her mother and father almost never went to temple either- but in front of aunt Shala they wanted to come off like they did. That meant praying in thanks to the ancestors before meals, but, with very few exceptions, Tali would find herself tucking into her meal the moment someone presented her a plate. How could they have chided her for forgetting? Her father always found a way, despite the fact that her auntie never seemed to mind in the slightest.

Quickly, before Shepard could notice, she sucked her finger clean and began her own prayers. She hadn't done _that_ in a while, probably because she hadn't found much to be thankful for. When she finished, she opened her eyes to find him staring at her almost in shock.

"What?" she questioned too innocently, "I can be religious, too."

His expression turned to a smile as he chuckled to himself, mumbling in his barking language.

She stuck another finger into her food and scowled at the mash, breathing deeply to assist her in imagining that she was about to eat what she smelled from Shepard's meal.

He said something to her and frowned.

She put a fake smile on, not her best, and one that she knew wouldn't reach her eyes no matter how hard she tried. "Mine is good," she said, "Really."

For once she felt glad that he had no idea what she was saying. He would have called her out for being a terrible liar.

He pointed to her food tray, and then curled a lip to tap a finger on his teeth. He then pointed to the claws on her feet, left exposed to open air by the cheap sandals they had forced her to replace her boots with, and finally to his own tray. Tali felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude, warmth, hope, and giddiness, all mingled together, swelling up within her.

It didn't take a genius to see what he was getting at. Her race had claws, and therefore must have had cause to use them at some point on the evolutionary latter, or in other words, she had a taste for flesh. He, on the other hand, had blunt teeth less suited to such a diet and more suited to the paste...

That she had already jammed her fingers into _twice_. Once after _licking it clean._

He offered his tray to her with one hand and held his other open next to hers, clearly intending to accept it.

She grimaced inwardly, hesitating as she stared down at her mush, two finger-holes glaring back up at her like hollow eye sockets, accusing her or being a terrible, inconsiderate person. Not only had she slobbered all over the food she was about to hand him, but what he wanted to do what amounted to saving her life. Although probably wasn't aware of that fact, it didn't change anything. She knew, and she would have to repay him. She couldn't imagine her family's reaction if she told them she had accepted something like this, only for them to find out she hadn't compensated him for it.

Still, it looked so _tempting_. And hers looked so... She had to resist the urge to smooth over the excavated root-paste with more fingers. She looked up at Shepard hesitantly, only to see him looking down at her food while trying not to smile too broadly. She immediately felt a hundred times better without knowing exactly why.

_I'm glad you find this funny, american, or human, or whatever you are. Seriously. Better that than being disgusted._

Reluctantly, she handed him her food tray before snatching his away a little too quickly. She mumbled an apology before devouring her meal in record time. As Shepard ate at a more comfortable pace, she turned away, otherwise unable to hide her blush. She had been trying hard, and ultimately failing, to think of anything other than the fact that he was now sucking her fingers by proxy.

...

**So, no consensus on Jane's addition yet. Most people don't seem to care either way and I've plotted out the story both with her and without her. Maybe this will help everyone decide: I'm a romantic at heart, so if Jane makes an appearance she's will wind up with Garrus, naturally. If she does not show up, I'm thinking of pairing the G-Man with either Kasumi or Jack. I always liked the idea of bad girls falling for straight-laced authority-figure types.**

**Please review this.**


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